|
'How has the Muslim Brotherhood been involved in the Israeli - Palestinian conflict? Dilip Hiro, author and journalist, in The Essential Middle East / A Comprehensive Guide, wrote: "During his visits to Palestine between 1942 and 1945, Hassan al-Banna set up Muslim Brotherhood branches in many towns. After the 1948-1949 Palestine War, the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian authority and the West Bank was annexed by Jordan. With this the fate of the Brotherhood in Gaza became intertwined with its Egyptian counterpart, and that of the Brotherhood in the West Bank with its Jordanian counterpart.
After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. In order to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Occupied Territories, in 1973 Israel issued a license to Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, the Brotherhood leader in the Occupied Territories, to set up the Islamic Center as a charity to run social, religious, and welfare institutions. It encouraged the growth of Islamic Center / Muslim Brotherhood -- funded chiefly by contributions from private and official sources in the Gulf states -- as a counter point to the secular PLO to the extent of providing funds covertly to the mosques in the Occupied Territories, especially the Gaza Strip, considered sympathetic to it. But following the dramatic rise of Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli government had second thoughts. It arrested Yassin in 1983 for illegal possession of arms and sentenced him to a long prison term. However, he was released two years later as part of a prison exchange deal between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
Yassin built on the popularity he had gained as a political convict of Israel and rapidly increased the membership of the Islamic Center/Muslim Brotherhood. With eruption of the intifada in December 1987, Yassin and six other leaders of the Brotherhood decided to join the mass movement against the Israeli occupiers. The result was the founding of Hamas as the activist arm of the (Muslim) Brotherhood."
http://www.israelipalestinianprocon.org/bin/procon/procon.cgi?database=5-Q-Subs.db&command=viewone&id=13&op=t
________________________________
'Hamas: A Behavioral Profile
Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela
Tel Aviv University
The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research
>snip
Roots and Perceptions
Hamas' origins have been rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood Society (MB) (jama'at al-ikhwan al-muslimin) in the Gaza Strip and more specifically, in its main embodiment since the late 1970s - al-Mujamma' al-Islami. Under the Egyptian military government in the Gaza Strip (1948-1967), the MB activity was tolerated or repressed along with the policy conducted against the MB in Egypt itself. Thus, following the ban on the MB in Egypt in early 1949, the MB branch in Gaza was reshaped into a religious-educational center under the title Unification Association (jam'iyyat al-tawhid). During the short-lived honeymoon of relations between the Free Officers regime and the MB (1952-1954) the MB in the Strip prospered, attracting many young Palestinians in the refugee camps as well as in Egyptian universities. Yet the new, and long-standing, ban on the MB in Egypt in 1954 - following a MB attempt on Nasir's life--determined the hostile nature of relationship between the Nasirist regime and the MB, leading to the adoption of systematic repression against its leading members in the Gaza Strip as well. This forced the MB in the Strip to assume secret and discrete activity which, along with the pressure of the Arab nationalist wave in the early 1960s, led to the disintegration of the association. Nasir's harsh policy against the MB in Egypt reached the zenith in the aftermath of the coup d'etat attempt in 1965, which led to the arrest of thousands of the association's activists in Egypt, among whom was Ahmad Yasin, later the founder of Hamas.1
The origins of Islamic awakening in historic Palestine were not different from other countries in the Middle East which, since the late 1960s, has demonstrated itself as the most significant ideological, social, and political trend. Contemporary Islamic movements share the ideal of the Prophet's Muslim society, a religious and political community with the shari'a (the Islamic Law) as its sole source of law as well as the norm for individual behavior. Only the boundaries of the community of the faithful (umma) determine the boundaries of political power with no territorial definition for the Islamic state which is to be universal. Yet under this umbrella, mainstream Islamists have assumed typical national character, acquiescing in the existing international order of states and restricting their activity within state boundaries.2 Furthermore, modern radical Islam is highly fragmented within states, represented by political groups, movements, and formal parties that differ in their ideological zealotry, political platform, means, and relations with the ruling elite. Olivier Roy discerned two poles of Islamic thought which had marked contemporary Islamic movements in the 20th century: a revolutionary pole, for whom Islamization of the society is attained through state power, and a reformist pole for whom the advent of the Islamic state is the result of social and political action from bottom up aimed primarily to re-Islamize the society (neofundamentalism).3
One may assume that under the unique circumstances of Jewish domination in Palestine and military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian Islamists would be decisively inclined toward revolutionary political Islam. In reality, however, the MB in the occupied territories oscillated between two main attitudes and strategies of action concerning nationalist vis-a-vis all-Islamic priorities. As of the early 1980s, the Palestinian Islamist spectrum was defined, on the activist-nationalist end, by the Islamic Jihad Movement (harakat al-jihad al-islami) whose main thrust was "armed struggle now" for the liberation of Palestine in its entirety.
The proponents of this approach envisioned the mobilization of Islam in the liberation of Palestine. Until 1987, however, the mainstream of the Palestinian MB followed the universal, normative approach to the issue of Jihad. The representative of this approach was The Islamic Association (al-mujamma' al-islami) which, since its establishment in 1979, constituted the MB's main organization the Gaza Strip. The Mujamma', defined its goals sheerly in terms of individual acommunal work in the fields of preaching and education, health care, charity and social welfare in the spirit of Islamic moral tradition.4
That the Mujamma' continued to focus on reformist approach of Islamic action from bottom up was due to Israel's tacit consent to Islamic education, preaching and establishment of social and religious infrastructure. Apparently, the Israeli authorities perceived this brand of Islamic activity as harmless and a potential for balancing the nationalist militant movements under the PLO's umbrella.5 Thus, whereas the Islamic Jihad adopted unequivocal Palestinian nationalist affiliation, the Mujamma' claimed allegiance to an abstract Islamic identity, blurring the boundaries between state (dawla) and Islamic nation (umma), and to the "great religion" (al-din al-'azim) and its written law--the Qur'an.6
1. Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 9.
2. See, for example, Hassan A. Turabi, "Islam as a Pan-National Movement", RSA Journal, August-September, 1992, pp. 608-619.
3. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 24, 77-80.
4. Request for registration of Jam'iyyat Jawrat al-Shams al-Islamiyya (later known as al-Mujamma' al-islami) by Ya'qub 'Uthman Quayq to the Civil Administration, August 4, 1977.
5. In 1967-86 the number of mosques in the Gaza Strip doubled (from 77 to 150). Most of the new mosques were private, The (Israeli) Civil Administration, The Islamic Activity in the Gaza Region, Gaza, 1987, p. 15. See also Housing Minister Ben-Eli'ezer quoted in Yedi'ot Aharonot, June 17, 1994.
6. Leaflet of the "Islamic Block" in the Islamic University of Gaza, n.d. (1986).
http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=11#roots
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
